My opinion is that you have an estimation problem. It seems that the time to test each feature is missing, and only the building part is being considered when planning the sprint. I’m not saying it is an easy problem to solve, because it is more common than anything. But things that could help are: … Read more
Tips: Avoid writing procedural code Tests can be a bear to maintain if they’re written against procedural-style code that relies heavily on global state or lies deep in the body of an ugly method. If you’re writing code in an OO language, use OO constructs effectively to reduce this. Avoid global state if at all … Read more
Trello.com Trello is free for unlimited users. Period. You almost definitely don’t need “Sub-cards”. Use the checklists instead, or if you REALLY need sub-cards, don’t have a parent sub-card. Just name the tickets something like “Epic – Story A” or “Story – task Z” or whatever. Another idea is to create two boards (did I … Read more
There are several options, and sometimes a combination of these is useful: automated installation disk imaging virtualization source code control Details on the various options: Automated Installation Tools for automating installation and configuration of a workstation’s various services, tools and config files: Puppet has a learning curve but is powerful. You define classes of machines … Read more
Scrum really doesn’t dictate that you have to be working on the one self-contained product. It simply states that there is a bunch of stuff that needs to be done (the product backlog), there is a certain amount of development time available in the next iteration (worked out from the project velocity) and there are … Read more
First, testing is like security — you can never be 100% sure you’ve got it, but each layer adds more confidence and a framework for more easily fixing the problems that remain. Second, you can break tests into subroutines which themselves can then be tested. When you have 20 similar tests, making a (tested) subroutine … Read more
The Fibonacci series is just one example of an exponential estimation scale. The reason an exponential scale is used comes from Information Theory. The information that we obtain out of estimation grows much slower than the precision of estimation. In fact it grows as a logarithmic function. This is the reason for the higher uncertainty … Read more
This is relatively normal and can sometimes be a complaint of our team members if projects continue for a long period of time. The key to what we’re talking about here is sustainable pace. If you and your team are able to sustain your pace over the long term, that’s excellent — you’ve achieve the … Read more
The reason given is actually a huge benefit. Builds that go to QA should only ever come from a system that builds only from the repository. This way build packages are reproducible and traceable. Developers manually building code for anything except their own testing is dangerous. Too much risk of stuff not getting checked in, … Read more